[mythtv-users] mythbuntu-diskless - how to set client hostname?

Jim Stichnoth stichnot at gmail.com
Wed Dec 29 00:20:22 UTC 2010


On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 10:31 AM, Steven Adeff <adeffs.mythtv at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 1:01 PM, Greg Oliver <oliver.greg at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 11:02 AM, Jim Stichnoth <stichnot at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I'm moving to mythbuntu 10.04 (for the LTS aspect -- I build my own
>>> myth binaries from source) and I want to set up my 3 netbooting ION
>>> frontends as Mythbuntu-Diskless clients according to the instructions
>>> at http://www.mythbuntu.org/wiki/network-boot-mythbuntu-diskless .
>>> The only issue so far is that when the diskless client boots, it
>>> insists on settings its hostname as the MAC address.  A related issue
>>> is that it auto-generates an /etc/hosts file whereas I would like to
>>> use a system-wide hosts file.
>>>
>>> Does anyone have experience getting this to work "right"?  Or do I
>>> need to resort to something like overriding hostname and /etc/hosts in
>>> rc.local?
>>>
>>
>> I remember digging for this for a couple of hours when I wanted my
>> router to set my hostnames.  The config file is "inside" the chroot
>> environment.
>>
>> /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/ltsp
>>
>> change OVERLAYKEY="HOSTNAME"
>>
>> and rebuild the initrd - you'll be good to go and have friendly
>> hostnames again..
>>
>> -Greg
>
> would be good for this to be added to the wiki

I tried to add to the wiki but failed in frustration.  In any case,
here are some of the notable bits of my experience.

1. The instructions on blacklisting the nouveau driver in the
blacklist.conf file didn't work for me.  I had to add
"blacklist=nouveau" to the boot options in the appropriate file(s) in
the pxelinux.cfg directory.

2. As noted in this thread, by default the client hostname ends up
being its MAC address.  I tried changing the line in
/opt/ltsp/i386/etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/ltsp to read:
  OVERLAYKEY="HOSTNAME"
but I ended up with the client hostname being "ltsp", perhaps due to a
competing router failing to correctly implement the DHCP host-name
option.  In the end, I made one file for each client in the
pxelinux.cfg directory, with "overlaykey=<desired-hostname>" in the
boot options.

3. Strangely, the user and group IDs for the mythtv user are different
on the server and client machines.  This causes problems if you want
to use NFS to share files between the server and client.  I dealt with
this by settling on a common uid/gid, using "vipw" and "vigr" in both
the server and chroot environments to change them, and then using
something like "find / -user <old_mythtv_uid>" to locate files owned
by mythtv and chown them back to the new mythtv uid.

4. In my case, the server and client kernels were a different version.
 This gave me problems when trying to install the nvidia driver within
the chroot environment.  I solved this by simply upgrading the
server's kernel to the slightly newer version of the client
installation.

5. Early experience is that the client *really* doesn't like it if you
ltsp-update-image and overwrite the base file system it is running on.
:(

Jim


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